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Summary
After twelve years of suffering mysterious disappearances of society's most-productive individuals, the nation's economy is on the verge of collapse. As the government pursues policies imposing even greater brutality against those remaining, Dagny Taggart, Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental, must make a choice between saving the nation's collapsing infrastructure or the man she has come to love - the man who would stop the motor of the World....
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Corporate salesman Steve Butler has been dispatched to the rural town of McKinley with his sales partner to offer much-needed relief to the economically hard-hit residents in exchange for drilling rights to their properties. As they grapple with a surprising array of both open hearts and closed doors, the outsiders soon discover the strength of an American small town at a crossroads.
3) Oklahoma!
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Laurie, an Oklahoma farm gal is courted by boisterous cowboy Curley and by menacing, obsessive farm hand Jud Frye. Fearing that Jud will do something terrible to Curley, Laurie accepts Jud's invitation to the box social. But Curley rescues Laurie from Jud's unwanted advances, and wins her hand. On the eve of their wedding, Laurie and Curley are menaced by Jud. During a fight with Curley, Jud falls on his own knife and is killed. The local deputy insists...
4) Naked
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In Naked, David Sedaris's message alternately rendered in Fakespeare, Italian, Spanish, and pidgin Greek is the same: pay attention to me.
Whether he's taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, sorting out the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-packing factory, or celebrating Christmas in the company of a recently paroled prostitute, this collection of memoirs creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar
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Hassan is a culinary ingenue with the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch. Displaced from their native India, his family settles in a quaint village in the south of France. They plan to open an Indian restaurant, that is, until Madame Mallory, the owner of a classical French restaurant, gets wind of it. Her icy protests against the new Indian restaurant so near her own escalate to all out war; until Hassan's cooking talent and love for Mme. Mallory's...
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"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless...
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From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right. Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys"...
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Four siblings experience the drama, intrigue, and upheaval of a summer when everything changed , in New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand's first historical novel Welcome to the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. It's 1969, and for the Levin family, the times they are a-changing. Every year the children have looked forward to spending the summer at their grandmother's historic home in downtown Nantucket. But like so much...
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"Set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond, from the author of Me Before You and The Peacock Emporium. Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a...
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Acquaintance rape is a crime like no other. Unlike burglary or embezzlement or any other felony, the victim often comes under more suspicion than the alleged perpetrator. This is especially true if the victim is sexually active, if she had been drinking prior to the assault--and if the man she accuses plays on a popular sports team. For a woman in this situation, the pain of being forced into sex against her will is only the beginning of her ordeal....
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Oxford history of the United States volume 6
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Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, this fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War: the Dred Scott decision: the Lincoln-Douglas...
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For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders -- some call them the most successful rodeo family in history. Now Bill and Evelyn Wright, parents to 13 children and grandparents to many more, find themselves struggling to hang on to the majestic landscape where they've been running cattle for 150 years as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought, and rearranged by public-land...
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"Caught in the Revolution is Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eye-witness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold. Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin's Bolshevik coup in October, Petrograd (the former St. Petersburg) was in turmoil--felt nowhere more keenly than on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt. There, the foreign visitors who filled hotels, clubs, bars...
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For decades William L. Langer's best-selling Encyclopedia of World History was the indispensable, authoritative guide to all of human history. Now, under the direction of a distinguished new editor, comes an updated and dramatically improved version for a new generation. The result is a wholly accessible, absorbing canvas of world history that no student, scholar, or amateur historian should be without. Renowned historian Peter N. Stearns and thirty...
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If you are looking to brush up on your literary knowledge, check a favorite author's work, or see a year's bestsellers at a glance, The Chronology of American Literature is the perfect resource. At once an authoritative reference and an ideal browser's guide, this book outlines the indispensable information in America's rich literary past - from major publications to lesser-known gems - while also identifying larger trends along the literary timeline....
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"Now in its fourth edition, Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture deals with the impact of advertising upon American character and culture. It offers a definition of advertising, explains the way advertising agencies work, discusses the functions of advertising, and provides a psycho-cultural perspective on advertising. Among the topics it deals with are the role of brands in selling products and the problem of self-alienation and its relation to consumption....
17) The Columbia companion to American history on film: how the movies have portrayed the American past
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American history has always been an irresistible source of inspiration for filmmakers, and today, for good or ill, most Americans sense of the past likely comes more from Hollywood than from the works of historians. In important films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), -Roots (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), and -Saving Private Ryan (1998), how much is entertainment and how much is rooted in historical fact? In The Columbia Companion to American...
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A raucous history of American democracy at its wildest--and a bold rethinking of the relationship between the people and their politics. Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that...
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"We all have opinions about the television shows we watch, but television criticism is about much more than simply evaluating the merits of a particular show and deeming it 'good' or 'bad.' Rather, criticism uses the close examination of a television program to explore that program's cultural significance, creative strategies, and its place in a broader social context. How to Watch Television brings together forty original essays from today's leading...